This one is self explanatory, and shows how there is little to choose between liberals and Muslim activists. It came to yours truly in the form of a forwarded e-mail.

Looks like a small case of some people being able to dish it out, but not take it. Let’s start at the top. The story begins at Michigan State University with a mechanical engineering professor named Indrek Wichman.

Wichman sent an e-mail to the Muslim Student’s Association The e-mail was in response to the students’ protest of the Danish cartoons that portrayed the Prophet Muhammad as a terrorist. The group had complained the cartoons were “hate speech.” Enter Professor Wichman. In his e-mail, he said the following:

Dear Moslem Association: As a professor of Mechanical Engineering here at MSU I intend to protest your protest. I am offended not by cartoons, but by more mundane things like beheadings of civilians, cowardly attacks on public buildings, suicide murders, murders of Catholic priests (the latest in Turkey!), burning of Christian churches, the continued persecution of Coptic Christians in Egypt, the imposition of Sharia law on non-Muslims, the rapes of Scandinavian girls and women (called “whores” in your culture), the murder of film directors in Holland, and the rioting and looting in Paris France..

This is what offends me, a soft-spoken person and academic, and many, many, many of my colleagues. I counsel you dissatisfied, aggressive, brutal, and uncivilized slave-trading Moslems to be very aware of this as you proceed with your infantile “protests.”

If you do not like the values of the West — see the 1st Amendment — you are free to leave. I hope for God’s sake that most of you choose that option. Please return to your ancestral homelands and build them up yourselves instead of troubling Americans.

Cordially, I. S. Wichman, Professor of Mechanical Engineering”

Well! As you can imagine, the Muslim group at the university didn’t like this too well. They’re demanding Wichman be reprimanded and mandatory diversity training for faculty and a seminar on hate and discrimination for freshman. How nice. But now the Michigan chapter of CAIR has jumped into the fray. CAIR, the Council on American-Islamic Relations, apparently doesn’t believe that the good professor had the right to express his opinion.

For its part, the university is standing its ground. They say the e-mail was private, and they don’t intend to publicly condemn his remarks. That will probably change. Wichman says he never intended the e-mail to be made public, and wouldn’t have used the same strong language if he’d known it was going to get out.

How’s the left going to handle this one? If you’re in favor of the freedom of speech, as in the case of Ward Churchill, will the same protections be demanded for Indrek Wichman? I doubt it. Hey guys send this to everybody and ask them to do the same and tell them to keep passing it around till the whole country gets it. We are in a war to the bitter end.

Hat Tip: BJS

This would have been a real catastrophe, one that relegated even the descent on the Gulf Coast by Katrina the Bitch, the aftermath of that terrible visit and probably even 9/11 to Page 41.

The FBI has uncovered what officials consider a serious plot by jihadists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in hopes of causing a torrent of water to deluge lower Manhattan, the Daily News has learned.
The terrorists sought to drown the Financial District as New Orleans was by Hurricane Katrina, sources said. They also wanted to attack subways and other tunnels.

Imagine something like this happening at, say, late afternoon rush hour, when New Yorkers, plus commuters from the liberal wasteland of New Jersey and more dignified Connecticut packed the streets and subways of Manhattan by the millions. Unlike during the Katrina disaster, these people would have absolutely no notice that anything out of the ordinary was afoot, they would simply be going about their respective business when massive tonnages of water bore down on them.

Experts also said that even if the tunnel cracked, the Financial District would not be flooded because it is above the level of the river.

As the venerable James Taranto would say, “What would we do without experts?”

I know, you’re reading this post and wondering, “Seth, WTF’s yer point?”

Well, how about this? Sorry, but it means repetition.

The FBI has uncovered what officials consider a serious plot by jihadists to bomb the Holland Tunnel in hopes of causing a torrent of water to deluge lower Manhattan, the Daily News has learned.

The Bureau unearthed a terrorist plot that would, on achieving fruition, have more than qualified for the term “holocaust”., only this time it wouldn’t have victimized only my fellow Jews, it would have victimized seven digits’ worth of every kind of human being, from religion to economic level (or lack thereof), every ethnicity to political belief.

This kind of discovery does not originate among the trappings of liberal dogma, it is the product of complex investigative strategies and pure investigative excellence and related technologies, our Homeland Security venue and all its related agencies hard at work in conjunction with the security services of other countries.

Thank G-d these pros discovered the planned Op when they did.

Also, thank G-d the New York Times didn’t get wind of the Bureau’s investigation in its early stages. If they had, they would have trumpeted every detail they could lay hands on, amid an orgasm by Bill Keller, on their front page, thereby providing the terrorists the opportunity to cover their tracks and get away with whatever they had done or intended to do.

Okay, y’all, here’s my point: When the FBI is permitted to do what they’re good at without attracting the dubious and treasonous attention of The NYT, they can protect us “hands down”.

The NYT, on the other hand, has done and will do anything they can to sabotage anything the Bush Administration does to defend our country and its security for the simple reason that they can afterwards “blame Bush”. It doesn’t matter to liberals whether or not Islamofascists smash our country in to little bits, all they give a damn about is exposing or otherwise sabotaging our current administration’s efforts to protect our country and we, the people, in order to replace the President with a Democrat in 2008.

As is the case where the bulk of their illogical Utopian ambitions for our government and we, the people are concerned, any considerations of our wellbeing play second fiddle to liberals’ political agendas — as with the rest of their fantasies, liberals think they can always repair the damage they do to our country via “reasoned” approaches to the problems they create.

Right-O, let’s vote the likes of John Kerry, Howard Dean, Hillary Clinton or Jack Murtha into the Oval Office in 2008 and allow them to “negotiate with terrorists” on our behalf. Let’s let them pull all our troops out of everyplace else and “redeploy” them to less hostile climes, release all the terrorists we have in custody at GITMO and organize a Maypole dance to celebrate the end of everything non-Muslim. While Keller, the ACLU, the entire populations of Boston, San Francisco, Los Angeles, neighboring Hollywood, New York, Chicago and other liberal enclaves line up for either decapitation or conversion to subjection to Islamism, the folks responsible for America’s demise can make their explanations, but, alas and alack, there will be no turning back, no reprieve, only the choice between Caliphate and death.

As long as we even allow liberalism in this country, we are assuming the same level of existence as your common, everyday lemming.

It’s great to know that our government is protecting us from terrorists as they are. As far as I’m concerned, my idol in the homeland security millieu is Jack Bauer. Too bad he doesn’t really exist.
If he did, I’d be his greatest fan….

Greg Crosby’s written another of his usual winners, this one on political correctness in the obese children’s arena.

…The way things are done now is tantamount to living in denial. Officials are so afraid of hurting the feelings of kids that they refuse to call their problem by its correct name — obesity. The overly delicate approach adopted by the federal Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (and used by many doctors) avoids the word “obese” because of the stigma. So a kid who really is obese is simply called “overweight” by the CDC. A kid who is really overweight is called “at risk of overweight.” Don’t want to hurt the sensibilities of the little butterballs.

In my case, I was generally pretty thin until I was into my late twenties, when the indulgences of a “wine, women and song” lifestyle began to catch up with me. Even today, at fifty, I’m somewhat heavier than I’d like to be or than is healthy for me to be, and to that end I’ve enlisted the help of Matt Furey’s Combat Conditioning, the best exercise regimen I’ve yet encountered, which is based on using your own body weight as your exercise machine and which is helping me take off pounds and feel better overall, but that’s another story entirely.

Back on topic, when I was a lad, as Crosby points out as his own experience as well, there was none of this feel-good PC stuff a certain segment of our society has forced on the rest of us — if you were fat, you were told so in no uncertain terms, and that was good. Sure, it might well have hurt the feelings, for some reason, of kids who already had to know they were fat, coming into daily contact as they did with other children who weren’t fat, but it was also the best encouragement on earth to do something to remedy the situation, like eat less sweets and get more exercise. As an adult, I have met numerous acquaintances from my childhood days I hardly recognized because being called “fatty” et al finally got to them enough that they did something about it and were now in great shape.

Stroking them with neutral PC terminology doesn’t cut it, and rarely if ever will. I call attention to a quote in Greg Crosby’s OpEd,

According to Dr. Reginald Washington, a Denver pediatrician and co-chair of an American Academy of Pediatrics obesity task force, calling a child obese might “run the risk of making them angry, making the family angry,”

Instead of becoming angry, the family {In addition to the child subject of the diagnosis, I take this to mean the parents of same} should disconnect the kid from the tube, the X-Box or the computer and send him out for some exercise, refrain from over-feeding the child and counsel him/her regarding moderation during those supersized stops at the local fast food franchise after school. They should work at cultivating an interest on the part of the obese child in participating in competitive sports. Additional biproducts of a child’s being physically fit are that it generally helps bring up his or her school grades while augmenting the development of baggage-free social skills.

This is a really relevant OpEd, what I’d call recommended reading, and can be read in its entirety here.

Greetings from the U.S.A., dart board of a largely ungrateful world!

When I look at all the sacrifices this country has made and continues to make on behalf of so many others, then listen to all the negative feedback we get for it, it almost makes me want to continue building that wall along the Mexican border…. until it completely surrounds this nation, and just tell all those other countries, “Good luck on the outside”.

Peter Brookes sums things up as completely as I’ve ever seen them done in this regard, in an absolute must-read OpEd.

For all the worldwide whining and bellyaching about the United States, July 4th — America’s 230th birthday — provides an opportune time for them to consider for just a moment what the world might be like without good ol’ Uncle Sam.

The picture isn’t pretty. Absent U.S. leadership, diplomatic influence, military might, economic power and unprecedented generosity, life aboard planet earth would likely be pretty grim, indeed. Set aside the differences America made last century — just imagine a world where this country had vanished on Jan. 1, 2001.

On security, the United States is the global balance of power. While it’s not our preference, we are the world’s “cop on the beat,” providing critical stability in some of the planet’s toughest neighborhoods.

Further,

Also missing would be other gifts from “Uncle Sugar” — starting with 22 percent of the U.N. budget. That includes half the operations of the World Food Program, which feeds over 100 million in 81 countries.

Gone would be 17 percent of UNICEF’s costs to feed, vaccinate, educate and protect children in 157 countries — and 31 percent of the budget of the U.N. High Commissioner for Refugees, which assists more than 19 million refugees across the globe.

In 2005, Washington dispensed $28 billion in foreign aid, more than double the amount of the next highest donor (Japan), contributing nearly 26 percent of all official development assistance from the large industrialized countries.

Moreover, President Bush’s five-year $15 billion commitment under the Emergency Plan for AIDS Relief is the largest commitment by a single nation toward an international health initiative — ever — working in over 100 (mostly African) countries.

The United States is the world’s economic engine. We not only have the largest economy, we spend 40 percent of the world’s budget on R&D, driving mind-boggling innovation in areas like information technology, defense and medicine.

We’re the world’s ATM, too, providing 17 percent of the International Monetary Fund’s resources for nations in fiscal crisis, and funding 13 percent of World Bank programs that dole out billions in development assistance to needy countries.

And what does Uncle Sam get in return? Mostly grief, especially from all the ungrateful freeloaders who benefit tremendously from the global “public goods” we so selflessly provide with our time, effort, blood and treasure. How easily — and conveniently — they forget . . . unless they need help, of course.

Brooks’ OpEd is fantastic and seems to cover all the bases. Read the entire piece here.

I used to agree with the old saying that “you can never have too much education”. Now, however, I’m not quite sure.

Oh, no, I’m not knocking education, it is important, hell, vital. What I’m thinking is that it seems like the majority of the media’s {of course, it is the media} most-quoted “hallowed” intellectuals today are extreme liberals, and I thought of one possible reason for this: Too much education.

Look at it this way — you get a teenager who has not fully developed a mature political viewpoint, purely due to a lack of “real-world” experience (you know, putting bread on the table, paying taxes, sweating overstrained household and personal budgets, worrying about corporate downsizing in their fields or from their own employers, looking for a job in a glutted market, etcetera). He/ she goes to college for four years and earns a BA or BS, then says “hasta la bye bye” and heads for the marketplace. For four years, he/ she has most likely been exposed to more than a little of the liberal political bias that seems to pervade on our campuses these days, but the new graduate’s got a strong mind and still thinks for himself.

On the other hand, whether to quench a thirst for higher learning, earn more saleable credentials, both, or simply to get mom & dad to continue supporting him/her (sad to say, but from my own observations, the latter would appear to include significantly more “hims” than “hers”), the graduate might continue on to earn a Master’s, then a PhD and end up branching off into other areas and earning other degrees, eventually going into teaching college.

We’re talking career academics, people who do little else but teach others what others taught them. It would be like spending an entire military career in boot camp, first as a recruit trainee for 500 months or so, then becoming a drill instructor. Meanwhile, the country’s been to war five times but our career boot camper has never been to any of them, and he’s training other people to go to war.

Our academics, likewise, spend their entire lives buried in what amounts to society’s training compound without ever being tested by the outside, and real, world. They are the theory side of Theory vs Practice. Consequently, they apply that theory to their opinions of what practice should be, which is more often than not like comparing an orangutang to an aardvark.

A concept (like socialism, or that diplomacy works well on people whose only demand is that you let them butcher you), even one that has repeatedly and historically proven not to work but looks good in theory is meat and drink to them. They become so immersed in their reality-sheltered world that the lives of large groups of people they don’t know don’t even matter to them, unless their circumstances help “prove” the theory at hand.

When confronted with practice-based evidence that their theories are ‘way off base, they simply ignore the new facts because they don’t fit the “accepted” scenario. This is a phenomenon known as “pontificating”, a pomposity that often afflicts those who spend too many years walking among Plato’s groves.

Somewhere along the line, one of their common theories has mankind living in harmony, good health, prosperity and peace as one global political entity, in which multiculturalism is playing an early role — deprivation of national identity. In their Utopian myopia, they don’t see the same rights they use to preach freely thus being taken away as one consequence of their theory. And remember what I said about previous failures of the concepts they espouse not mattering? We need only look to the European Union to see what happens when countries give up even an iota of their sovereignty to join in such a pact.

For some reason, too much education seems to lead to the taking of an adversarial position to the United States and our form of government as it was intended by our founding fathers, and as such has been the most successful political experiment in history. According to the output of these lifelong academics, too much education seems to cause support for failure and opposition to success.

If these people are the spokesmen for the “most educated” in this country, we’re in baaaaaad shape.

There are 3 Frenchman in the world whom I respect, one I know personally and two I have never met, one of those latter of whom I would like to meet.

This one is a blogger I’ve mentioned before, one of my all-time favorites who, for reasons of which I have no idea as it is a loss, rarely posts anymore, and more’s the pity because he is infinitely more a friend to America and the principles that make it great than the entire spectrum of American liberals.

Due to 4th of July activities, I only just saw his new post, and it is a wonderful Independence Day flash video tribute to America.

Thank You, Frogman!

This video is beautiful, and really must be shared.

H/T Brenda.

…. is funny!

The author links to PETA’s anti-KFC website, at which I found the following {exerpted from an article called The Hidden Lives Of Chickens}:

Chickens understand sophisticated intellectual concepts, learn from watching each other, demonstrate self-control, worry about the future, and even have cultural knowledge that is passed from generation to generation

Excuse me while I move away from my keyboard to take a sip of coffee, so as not to spew the java all over it during my next convulsion of laughter….

I had never read anything by Dave Weinbaum before, then I bumped into an OpEd of his at Jewish World Review a few minutes ago. Based on the column of his I just read, I’d love to buy him a beer.

The following comes from an email from Move America Forward

Unfortunately, it arrived in my G-mail with a zillion mile long Google-mail address, so linking it would be a major PITA.

It is an on-point message from Master Sergeant John Ubaldi:

On Tuesday, Americans across the nation will celebrate the 230th birthday of the United States of America. Everyone will be enjoying picnics, backyard barbeques, and the traditional fireworks display viewed throughout the country. Today, the armed forces of this republic are engaged in the monumental undertaking that determines if the democratic experiment begun on July 4th, 1776 will begin to sprout in the turbulent lands of the Middle East.
It’s easy to forget the noble undertaking begun so long ago, easy to forget the auspicious beginning that gave hope to a world that a government can be ruled by its citizens. President George Washington warned Americans that they had a new responsibility when he stated in his first inaugural address, “The preservation of the sacred fire of liberty and the destiny of the republican model of government are justly considered, perhaps, as deeply, as finally, staked on the experiment entrusted to the hands of the American people.”
From the birth of this Republic, the foundation of this country was the proposition that all men are created equal. As President Abraham Lincoln stated in the Gettysburg Address, “That this nation under God, Shall have a new birth of freedom-and that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth.”
Abraham Lincoln envisioned that the guiding principles of the Declaration of Independence and the rights conveyed in the United States Constitution would be the foundation that humanity rests on, eloquently written in the Declaration of Independence, “We hold these truths to be self-evident, that all men are created equal.” It’s instructive that many of our brave military men & women understand they are serving the cause of freedom enumerated in that cherished document, sacrificing and establishing the basic foundation of democracy in the unstable often volatile region of the Middle East.
To the families of the fallen brings a special solemn meaning of sacrifice, as Margaret Johnson, mother of fallen Army Captain Christopher Johnson, stated in the Washington Times, “He knew the cost of freedom and that it was not free, and he volunteered to go to Iraq anyway.”
The many Gold Star Families who lost a loved one in the war against terrorism have the courage and satisfaction that their loved ones sacrificed all in freedom’s cause. President Kennedy wrote in “Profiles in Courage” that, “In the days ahead, only the very courageous will be able to take the hard and unpopular decisions necessary for our survival in the struggle with a powerful enemy. And only the very courageous will be able to keep alive the spirit of individualism and dissent which gave birth to this nation, nourished it as an infant, and carried it through its severest tests upon the attainment of its maturity.”
As we celebrate the birth of this nation and the freedoms that we enjoy, we must remember the country’s most treasured wealth; the youth who are engaged in the eternal fight against the adversary of darkness. Freedom cannot survive here if neighboring nations have lost theirs.
The contemplation of the meaning of freedom is too often a vernacular of popular expression that easily reverberates in our dialogue as we discuss the rights embodied in the Constitution. Over time a tilt toward the direction of evil has contaminated the moral compass that we enjoy. Too often we have failed to realize that many regions and nations of the world still live under the cloud of totalitarianism, unable to enjoy the basic rights of man.
Freedom and democracy include the participation of all, but too often many nations of the world are left in dark blanket of oppression that enslaves them to an endless abyss of misery. For freedom to be sowed, nations and individuals must be willing to stand up to the forces of evil or forever sentence future generations to a world without freedom.
As the debate intensifies surrounding The War on Terror, many people throughout the vast expanse of the Middle East live as President Vaclav Havel lived under the banner of communism in Czechoslovakia. As the first President of his nation, after the fall of communism, stating in 1990, “That we live in a contaminated moral climate. We fell morally ill because we became used to saying something different from what we thought.”
It seems many of us view July 4th as having little meaning beyond a day of watching fire works, and planning the backyard barbeque, but we fail as a nation to remember the history that is personified and articulated in the Declaration of Independence with the embodiment of individual liberty enshrined in the United States Constitution.
Individual freedoms have been the hallmark and legacy that America brought to the world, not for the benefit of America, but for the benefit of humanity. We celebrate these rights, and cherish the fundamental rights of freedom of the press, freedom of speech, freedom to assemble, freedom of religion, but we fail to remember that millions around the world are denied these basic rights.
Today in the spirit of that revolution that forever changed mankind, we are again building the fundamental foundation of democracy in a region that has only known terror and oppression. Americans too easily take for granted these basic rights, when we have been blessed with an overabundance of freedom that millions living under the yoke of oppression yearn for.
Abraham Lincoln stated in a letter to Henry Pierce on April 6, 1859 that, “Those who deny freedom to others, deserve it not for themselves; and, under a just God, can not long retain it.”
We often only look at our own circumstance without looking at the broader ramifications of our public discourse in regard to our intervention in Iraq. Alexander Solzhenitsyn stated in a Harvard Address in June 1978, “The Western world has lost its civil courage, both as a whole and separately, and in each country, each government, each political party and of course in the United Nations. Such a decline in courage is particularly noticeable among the ruling groups and the intellectual elite, causing an impression of loss of courage by the entire society.”
Opponents of the War on Terror, often speak of love of the basic rights guaranteed under the Constitution, that they are defending what we hold sacred. These same individuals hide behind the very foundations on what this nation was founded on, secure in the beliefs that they have nothing to fear from a tyrannical government. Those who protest against our troops and the missions they are serving in do not offer a practical solution to help those suffering under the suffocating burden of a despotic regime.
It’s easy to speak cavalierly about freedom if you are someone who has never fought for that freedom, when you live in the freest nation in the history of mankind. I note that those people seldom if ever mention the enslaved individuals behind the walls of tyranny in North Korea, Iran, and would have kept millions of Iraqi’s under the brutal dictatorship of Saddam Hussein.
President Theodore Roosevelt said it best in Paris, France on April 23rd, 1910, “It is not the critic who counts: not the man who points out how the strong man stumbles or where the doer of deeds could have done better. The credit belongs to the man who is actually in the arena, whose face is marred by dust and sweat and blood, who strives valiantly, who errs and comes up short again and again, because there is no effort without error or shortcoming, but who knows the great enthusiasms, the great devotions, who spends himself for a worthy cause; who, at the best, knows, in the end, the triumph of high achievement, and who, at the worst, if he fails, at least he fails while daring greatly, so that his place shall never be with those cold and timid souls who knew neither victory nor defeat.”
Having served in Operation Enduring Freeom (Afghanistan) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (Iraq), I witnessed first-hand the progress of people who are beginning to break the yoke of bondage that has enslaved them for generations. Many have stated that the people of the Arab and Muslim world do not want democracy imposed on them; we aren’t imposing democracy, but establishing the foundations of democracy, that only they can choose to implement and embrace.
Last year Iraq witnessed three monumental elections that would have been unthinkable only a few years ago. I was moved as I stood there, looking into the faces of these eager pioneers who for the first time were controlling their own destiny. The elections in December 2005 witnessed over 70% of the Iraqi people voting in the first free election in the Middle East. Contrast that 70% turnout with our own election last month when we could barley get over 30% of eligible voters to participate in a primary election. I believe our founding fathers would have been embarrassed that so few Americans took part in the electoral process. What’s our excuse?
Nobody including those who serve want conflict! Ask those who served during World War II if they wanted to serve, they didn’t of course, but they all knew that freedom is a cause worth defending. Those who find nothing important enough to them to be willing to defend and fight for, seem to me to be the sort of miserable creatures that John Stuart Mills wrote about. These people stand back and allow the forces of evil to gain a foothold in the hearts and minds of mankind.
As Mills stated, “War is an ugly thing, but not the ugliest of things. The decayed and degraded state of moral and patriotic feeling which thinks that nothing is worth war is much worse. The person who has nothing for which he is willing to fight, nothing which is more important than his own personal safety, is a miserable creature and has no chance of being free unless made and kept so by the exertions of better men than himself.”
On this Fourth of July lets celebrate the principles of what this nation stands for: that freedom belongs to all mankind, and lets help lift the weight of tyranny so all mankind may enjoy the fruits of freedom. The revolution that started on July 4th 1776 sparked a desire in the hearts of men that man is destined to be free as our creator intended not to be enslaved, but free! Lets spread that same freedom to others or some day our own freedom will be in jeopardy! Lets stand for freedom for all!